What We're
Reading
Bob
Dylan,
Chronicles, Volume
One
 Reviewed
by
John Kotarski,
'93
Director of Web Development and Communications
Perhaps the first “savior of
rock music,” it’s long
been known that Bob Dylan fiercely
resisted the labels thrust upon him
by adoring fans and critics. If it
took him some forty years to respond
to a few of them, within the context
of his autobiography, so be it.
“ As far as I knew,” he writes, “I didn’t
belong to anybody then or now. I had a wife and children whom
I loved more than anything else in the world. I was trying
to provide for them, keep out of trouble, but the bugs in
the press kept promoting me as the mouthpiece, spokesman,
or even conscience of a generation…I had very little
in common with and knew even less about the generation that
I was supposed to be the voice of.”
One might expect  such
themes to dominate the pages of the initial tome
of his three-volume memoir Chronicles. But
this isn’t a tale of the dark side of fame.
And it’s not a “behind the scenes” look
at rock or the social turbulence of the 1960s.
Beginning and ending with the signing of his first recording
contract, Chronicles skips through just part of Dylan’s
life and career, concentrating upon several creative periods
in 1961 and 1987. With so much ground to cover, Dylan simply
abandons the linear approach, comfortable to move between
decades at the drop of a hat.
Dylan’s prose is remarkably engaging, with a loose,
rambling style, and words that effortlessly drive his prose.
It’s the closest any of us will ever come  to
seeing from his point of view, and in this way, he delivers.
Through Chronicles, we’re transported from
the barren winter wastelands of Dylan’s Minnesota adolescence
to the steamy jazz clubs of New Orleans, from clubs and galleries
of the sixties New York folk/art/theater scenes to the hospital
room of an ailing Woody Guthrie, where Dylan sat at his bedside
for hours on end, playing the American legend’s songs
back to him.
What emerges isn’t the angry voice of a generation
or fierce loner. It’s a thoughtful and hardworking
artist trying to find his place amongst a long tradition
of American songwriters. It’s a family man
who moves his wife and children to another town to
get away from the protesters outside his home (the
liberal ones, who insisted that he explicitly denounce
the war in Vietnam). It’s the rugged optimist
who finds the strength to finish an album after an
uneventful motorcycle ride with his wife in rural
Louisiana.
This book is about Dylan, mind you. But at its best, Chronicles
also conveys Dylan’s love for music, the history of
English and American folk songs, and the writers and performers
who kept these stories alive. Dylan clearly admires the artists
whose passion for performance made him believe they were the
subjects of the very sea shanties and murder ballads they
sang, the artists who made him strive to be a better musician
because of the vitality they brought to their art.
It’s fitting that Dylan spends many of the
last pages of this volume telling the story of Robert
Johnson, the legendary Delta bluesman whose two dozen
recorded sides in the mid-thirties gave him fame
some thirty years after his death, reigniting untold
passion  for
the blues in the American folk-life of the 1960s.
As the tale goes, Johnson sold his soul to the devil
at a four-way crossroads at midnight (“Me and
The Devil Blues”) in return for fearsome talent
as a songwriter and guitar player. But Dylan wastes
no time giving credence to such legends. Instead,
Dylan writes about Johnson’s style, his voice
and rhythm, what the music taught him as a lyricist
and a performer.
“In about 1964 and ’65, I probably used about
five or six of Robert Johnson’s blues song forms, too,
unconsciously, but more on the lyrical imagery side of things.
If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record when I
did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of
mine that would have been shut down – that I wouldn’t
have felt free enough or upraised enough to write... I just
couldn’t imagine how Johnson’s mind could go
in and out of so many places. He seems to know about everything,
he even throws in Confucius-like sayings whenever it suits
him. Neither forlorn or hopeless or shackled – nothing
hinders him…Robert Johnson’s code of language
was like nothing I’d heard before or since.”
Like Johnson, Dylan’s legacy in American history
may be ultimately as much myth as truth.
But in the American  songbook,
Dylan’s contributions are as vital now as ever. By celebrating
the lives and work of so many others, Chronicles
shows us why.
What
We're Reading features reviews
by members of the Southwestern University
community. Some reviews were previously
published in the Library's annual Summer
Reading List.
Read
more reviews
What
We're Reading is a regular
feature of the A.
Frank Smith, Jr. Library Center.
|
